“With Colleagues Like That, Who Needs Enemies?”: Doctors and Repression under Military and Post-Authoritarian Brazil

As young medical students at Guanabara State University, Luiz Roberto Tenório and Ricardo Agnese Fayad received some of the best medical education offered in 1960s Brazil. For six years, the peers in the same entering class had studied the principles of the healing arts and practiced their application at the university’s teaching hospital. They had also witnessed the Brazilian military oust a democratically elected president and install a dictatorship that ruled the country for 21 years (1964–85). After graduating, however, Tenório and Fayad embarked on very distinct paths. The former became a political dissident in opposition to the military regime and provided medical assistance to members of the armed left. The latter joined the armed forces and, as a military physician, participated in the brutal torture and cruel treatment of political prisoners. At the end of military rule, Brazil’s medical board would find him guilty of violating the Brazilian code of medical ethics and revoke his license.

Exploring the intersections and divergences in Tenório and Fayad’s trajectories, this article illuminates the underexamined yet significant history of medical professionals under the military dictatorship in Brazil. First, it reveals the essential role doctors played in both facilitating and contesting state-sponsored repression. Physicians serving the regime’s security agencies systematically monitored detainees to enable prolonged torture sessions, falsified death certificates to conceal extralegal executions, and even advised agents on how to inflict pain efficiently. On the other side, however, were progressive physicians who campaigned for public health reforms and better working conditions, denounced human rights abuses, and even provided medical care to members of the armed opposition. Second, the article looks into subsequent efforts to hold doctors accountable for violating medical ethics under the dictatorship. In the context of Brazil’s gradual transition to democracy, a movement of progressive junior physicians mobilized to remake the sector’s leadership and introduce ethical reforms to its regulatory bodies. Relying on the virtually untouched records of Rio de Janeiro’s medical board, the article reveals the movement’s initiatives to investigate various health professionals involved in torture and degrading treatment of political prisoners.

The history of the medical community and its complex relationship with the military regime has largely been omitted in the scholarship. Studies on the involvement of physicians in state-sponsored repression and genocidal episodes during the twentieth century rarely explore Latin American cases.¹ In contrast, the substantial historiography on medicine and disease in Latin America that examines the role of doctors in shaping state policies and advancing “healthy society” focuses mostly on early to mid-century public health campaigns.² Although studies exploring Latin America’s Cold War often refer to the health policies carried out by high profile physician-leaders such as Juscelino Kubitschek, Che Guevara, and Salvador Allende, little has been written about the health professionals who supported or opposed the era’s authoritarian regimes.³

In addition to expanding these bodies of knowledge, this article contributes to the scholarship on the Brazilian military regime and its guided transition to democracy. First, the history of the medical community challenges a traditional historiographical interpretation that depicts Brazil’s liberal professionals— journalists, lawyers, academics, and others—as consolidated forces of opposition to Brazilian authoritarianism in the early 1980s.⁴ As the following analysis suggests, white-collar professionals were never unanimous in their support for liberalization processes. In fact, organizational support for democratic change was possible only after a complete leadership changeover within the medical sector’s regulatory and professional organizations.⁵

The historiography on the dictatorship saw a resurgence after the conclusion of the long overdue National Truth Commission (2012–14) and the fiftieth anniversary of the 1964 coup (2014).⁶ Historians have revealed the considerable support within congress, the business elite, and large segments of the public for the ouster of João Goulart.⁷ They have explored gender roles in the student movement and rethought the relationship between the regime and institutions of higher education.⁸ And they have reassessed United States’ role, both in the 1964...